The Snow Queen

Friday 12 December 2008 19.01 EST
First published on Friday 12 December 2008 19.01 EST

Mike Kenny is probably the most successful playwright you've never heard of. The reason for his relative anonymity is that he writes exclusively for children and family audiences, though one of the best things about the Christmas season is that there's always a bumper crop of his work on display.

Kenny's corpus of 60-odd plays contains at least three versions of The Snow Queen, and Gail McIntyre's production, aimed at the over-fives, is a composite of the best bits drawn from all of them.

As a moral adventure, Kenny's narrative sticks fairly closely to Hans Christian Andersen's original tale, in which a young girl's quest to rescue her friend from the Snow Queen's clutches illustrates the triumph of childhood imagination over cold, adult logic.

Yet the most innovative aspect of this particular Snow Queen is that there isn't one. The chilly villain never appears in person, though her spirit is evocatively suggested by wisps of gauze and eerie, disembodied whispers.

The idea fits well into a simple, imaginative production that makes much use of the suggestive power of light, sound and music. Ivan Stott's solo accompaniment is remarkably inventive, using samplers and a variety of acoustic instruments to create a rich soundscape of folk-tinged psychedelia - all while being dressed as a pigeon.

Stott practically steals the show with a song about the delights of flight that has the audience cooing along. In most places you are advised not to feed the pigeons: but indulging them in a bit of a sing-song can't do any harm.